Headlines

The new airport scanners will be able to see every molecule in your body

The invention, while technologically exciting, raises the sinister spectre of government, businesses and individuals having the ability to monitor everyone constantly.

As well as national security, the device could be used to everyday law enforcement – for example, it can detect even the tiniest quantity of drugs, such as the trace amounts of cocaine found on many banknotes.

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he process of scanning and downloading the information takes only picoseconds- so one-trillionth of a second- which means that security workers would be alerted to any alarming substances as you were approaching them.

As long as the perp approaches them to within a distance of 30 microns.

I suspect this technology is vaporware but if it’s real it’s very scary. If true it would represent the extinction of human privacy, at least, and probably the demise of freedom and liberty forever. It would be an transformational, evolutionary change in the human species, not to mention society, as secrecy would be a thing of the past.

I find some of the claims of the technology dubious. A laser might be able to detect surface contamination and possibly reach down to capillaries near the surface, thus allowing blood chemistry analysis, but if it’s not a penetrating wavelength like X-rays I’m not sure how it could live up to the claim that it can “scan every single molecule in our bodies”. I hope I’m right and this is just an Internet hoax, for if real then I fear that the human species will inevitably be enslaved under a technological yoke that may never be undone.

Even worse, it’s theoretically possible, unfortunately, that someday fairly soon there will be technology capable of reliably reading peoples thoughts. It will probably take a long time to perfect, but even a rudimentary capability would transform society. At some point such a capability matched with the scanner that is the subject of this headline, no secret could be hidden from the state or their business cronies.